Shane Battier's Comments After Game 7 Will Make Him A Hero In The Sports Stats Community

When Shane Battier was struggling to make shots, he knew that he
wasn't suddenly a bad shooter. He knew that eventually things
would even out and his shots would start falling.

And he explained that perfectly when he told the media after game
seven that "my mantra was I will regress to the mean."

"Regression towards the mean" is a concept strongly embraced by
those in the advanced sports stats community that says extreme
results don't tend to last. It is also apparently embraced by
Battier.

For sports traditionalists, the idea of "regression towards the
mean" is bothersome because it suggests that great performances
or really bad performances aren't necessarily real. Instead,
extreme performances are really just the result of an athlete
fluctuating around an average and sometimes that fluctuation is
greater than others.